exit, stage left
by Idrelle Miocovani
Summary: Sometimes a person is merely a puppet on a string, bending to the will of forces beyond their control. Call it fate, call it destiny, it eventually catches everyone. Multifandom, interlinked vignette.


**A/N: **This is a stylistic experiment. While it is not technically a crossover, I had nowhere else to put it on . While the characters do not cross their respective fandoms to interact with each other, they are linked by theme and mood. I'm not entirely sure where I'm going with this, but I really wanted to try a cohesive multifandom fic. Call it playing with if you are not familiar with the fandom of a section, I encourage you to give it a try and keep reading for the sake of the piece.

**List of fandoms:  
><strong>Part I - The Departed, Mistborn, Gladiator

* * *

><p>"<em><strong>exit, stage left"<strong>_

* * *

><p><em>i. puppet strings<em>

_the tick of the clock, the pain of the wait  
>(Madolyn || The Departed)<br>_

She does a lot of staring at clocks these days.

There is something obliquely fascinating about waiting for time to change; waiting for the little numbers to suddenly snap to one greater (or lesser) than the previous one; waiting for the hand to turn. A mark of passing time – _tick tick tick_ – in a world that seems to be stalled forever.

There is probably a good metaphor buried in there somewhere; she just doesn't feel like digging it out.

Metaphor or not, clocks are becoming a small obsession. She likes to think of it as healthy – it keeps her mind off certain events she would rather not ponder, and besides, other people collect worse things than clocks – but friends and colleagues would say otherwise. She is constantly hearing how distracted she has become. Whenever she goes out, she checks her watch on a regular basis, looking as if she is constantly waiting for the timeliest "right time" to exit. When she has a patient in her office, she looks as though she maintains eye contact with them for the most part; it is not true. Instead, her eyes are fixed somewhere over their left shoulder on the analogue clock by the door.

Not including her watch, she has three clocks in her bedroom. She hasn't placed them on purposed; her new landlady says that one of them belonged to the previous tenant, and the second is a permanent fixture of the room.

The third, of course, is hers – a small digital "dream machine" that is scheduled to wake her up at six o'clock in the morning with an annoying series of beeps blasting into her ears.

There may have been a time earlier in her career when such a thing would have concerned her. Now, she doesn't care. The clocks, the watches – they are all small reminders that her world is still working, that the days are still passing, and they give her the smallest sense of hope without being overly obtuse.

Well… as unobtuse as a set of clocks can be.

Sometimes it embarrasses her that she needs something as sappy as "hope". It is what people in films and books talk about. "Hope" is a word for oily politicians looking to stir the hearts of their people to convince them to support a war; "hope" belongs to regular church-goers, who want to provide salvation for everyone they meet, whether the person wants it or not. "Hope" is one of those romantic ideals, something that no one in the real world ever truly talks about.

Her office is an exception. She happily spews ideas about "hope" to her patients – the troubled officers, the ex-con artists, the arsonists, the criminals who have ruined every inch of their lives – but once she is outside those four dull beige walls, "hope" turns into nothing.

Except an idea.

It is an idea that makes her patients feel better. It is an idea that has no business in her life, especially if she is on the receiving end. She is not a criminal looking for a chance to live a normal life; she is not a cop who could not live knowing he had killed in cold blood.

She is simply a pregnant woman without a partner, waiting for her life to change.

She has tried to make it change. Once, she even went so far as to send off resumes, applying to as many jobs as she could find in other cities. She packed her bags and left Boston, swearing it was for the better.

New York changed nothing. She was there for a month, staying with an old roommate from college, before she knew it was not the place for her. She still felt the same – the same dullness, the same coldness, the same deadened weight that pulled at her at every turn.

San Francisco changed nothing. She was there for two months, deciding that she should try harder than she had in New York before giving up. In San Francisco, she was completely on her own. No relatives, no friends. A new city, a fresh start – even a new ocean, with different ports, different air. The Pacific over the Atlantic.

It felt the same. It fucking felt the same.

She returned to Boston, found a new apartment, returned to her job. It is what she knows, and the familiarity should ease the growing discomfort. Such a paradox she is living! On one hand, she wants to run, to fly, to free herself, to never stop moving for as long as she can; on the other, she wants to stay in one place, to wrap a warm blanket around her shoulders, and press on as if nothing is changing.

But it is changing. She can't keep denying it; she sees the signs of it every time she looks in the mirror. She feels the signs of it every morning when she vomits last evening's meal into her toilet. With each movement of the clock's hand, with each turn of the digital numbers, her baby grows inside her.

Her child.

Her son, from whom she wants to flee. Not because she does not love him, but because she does not know what to do next.

She is not ready to be a mother. Once, in the early stages of her pregnancy, before her life spun on a dime, she thought she was ready. She thought she could do it. She thought she would be a fantastic mother.

Now, she does not think so.

Her life doesn't belong to her anymore. She feels like someone else, like a puppet on strings, her body going through the motions while her mind watches, detached and uninterested. Time passes – slowly, but quickly, every day nearly the same. The same words, the same words spoken to the same people, the same sights.

The same thoughts.

She feels like a seventeen-year-old girl, knocked up by some idiot, drunken boy at a party. Except she is much older than seventeen, and her predicament is one no seventeen-year-old will ever have to deal with: she does not know who the father of her child is, and she will never know.

Both fathers are dead. Cops who sunk so deep into the mob life of Boston they could not find the way out. Officers of the law whose services ended with their brains blown against the side of a wall.

Fuck cops. Fuck them.

That's all she can think at the moment – coldly, deadly, and assuredly.

_in the shadow of love and power  
>(Kelsier || Mistborn)<br>_

All he can think at the moment is whether or not he made the right decision, dragging her into this. She has led such a harsh life – one no child should ever suffer – he wonders whether he should have brought her away from it when he had the chance, rather than digging the hole deeper.

The further he pushes her, the farther she will go, and the harder it will be to draw her out.

She will never leave this life, and it will eventually bring her ruin, just as it will him.

And it will be because of him. His meddling. Hasn't he ruined enough lives for one lifetime?

Even as she practices, he thinks she looks so much like Mare. The small, lithe body, the dark hair, the blunt tongue, the blossoming curiosity hidden by years spent in stealth and darkness. She is like the daughter they never had, the child who could have been theirs.

And then he realises – for all intents and purposes, she _is_ his daughter.

The thought strikes him cold, though perhaps that has more to do with rush of air passing over him as she pushes him with her Allomancy.

Beneath the swirl of mistcloaks, he thinks he sees the shadow of his dead wife in her movements and he is caught off-guard. He leaps aside – up and out – free-falling through the air to clear his head.

He lands upon the roof of a three-storied building, and crouches in the lurking mist – his friend and ally for only a few years. He can only help but wonder how his life would have gone had he had his Allomantic powers before his capture.

Perhaps the job would have gone differently.

Perhaps Mare would not have died.

If he was Mistborn then, the world would have been at his feet. Luthadel had already been at his feet – no nobleman was safe from his crew and over the years his heists grew to legendary proportions – but he could have accomplished so much more.

It is a question that claws at him every day. He would not be where he was today without Mare, without the heist gone wrong, without the Pits of Hathsin. He would not be attempting the impossible; he would not be striving forth to challenge a man who was essentially god if his life had not been destroyed.

He is not happy. He is not content. He wishes it were different, but at the same time he almost lustfully enjoys the path he has carved for himself. But he lost Mare to arrive at this place, and it makes him wonder what kind of heartless man he has become.

He loves his powers; the world can bow to him while he rides the mists. He is intoxicated by their energy, their flames keeping him alive and focused. But he became Mistborn because of Mare's sacrifice, and when he thinks of what he would have – the mists or his wife – he finds himself incapable of answering.

He has sworn he could do anything in her name. To him, this job is for her, for the bond they once shared, for the future that was stolen from them. It was falsehood – it was his way of making Mare part of who he was, part of his powers. Perhaps now she had been taken from him, he had transferred that love to the power which now burned within him.

It was a truthful thought, but a grotesque one that made him grimace at himself. What has happened to the man he once was? When he is with his crew, he can smile and laugh, but when he is alone, the darkness comes crashing back to him once more, reminding him of the act he plays each day.

He was once such an idealist. He could see the brightest point of every dark moment, searching out the good things that went with the poor. It was the only way to live; if he allowed himself to be beaten down, he would only submit to the darkness. That was not right. At the time, he could not understand how any man, woman or child could allow themselves to be beaten down, to have their laughter stolen from them, to have their lives taken from their hands.

He now knows how simple it is. How easy. To be oppressed… it is simpler than the alternative. Laughter takes work. Smiling in the face of emptiness feels like an impossible task when you are faced with it each day. What was once so easy for him, he now has to work for.

Perhaps that was why he has survived.

Mare… dear Mare. What would she think, if she could see him now? Depressed, lethargic, fighting a battle that could never be won?

She would be proud. He knows it.

And for that, he can smile. He still loves her, with every inch of his being, despite not knowing. Not knowing the truth, not knowing whether she did betray him. It is easier to accept than to think it through, than to challenge it.

Proof that he sometimes does take the easy way out.

But love… it is never easy.

He shakes his head.

What is the point of reminiscing? It is out of his reach now. He should not be attempting to put the past in the present, it will only end with the familiar emptiness. Mare has been taken from him, and by her own choice.

It is something he cannot change, no matter how hard he tries.

Hathsin is the past with which he must make amends.

Vin lands not far away from him, her cloak spinning in the air, her bare feet light on the rooftops. Her hand flashes into her pouch and withdraws a fistful of coins – she tosses them into the air and they fly at him. He pushes back, flinging himself out of the way and falls freely through the air.

Without Hathsin, he would never have known this freedom.

Without Hathsin, he would never have begun this path.

Without Hathsin, the Lord Ruler would never be challenged.

He has Hathsin to thank for causing the world to change. But even as he leaps to the next rooftop, watching his apprentice follow silently in the darkness, he is left wondering – wondering whether the power makes the man, or whether his ideals create him.

Given the chance, would he have preferred to be known as Mistborn or husband?

He cannot answer. He loathes himself for it, but until he can answer himself truthfully, he must put such questions away. He is not a philosopher; he is an idealist with a mission.

A mission to make a better world, regardless of what will happen to him.

The mist swirls, heavy with darkness, watching, waiting, enveloping.

A final thought comes unbidden. Perhaps philosophers and idealists are one and the same, and perhaps he has no business pretending to be either.

_and when the dust has settled  
>(Lucilla || Gladiator)<br>_

She has no business pretending to be a philosopher or an idealist. She is strictly neither, but over the long, arduous years, many have been convinced she joined their cause for the same reasons.

She is not her father; she has never had a wish to be her father. Her actions are dictated by something more than pensive thoughts about the world and its workings. She has heard the Senators talk, but they do just that – talk. There is little else that happens.

In one thing, perhaps, her brother was right.

She has little desire to think on him in this moment.

Time has passed, but little has changed. She has seen men and women die under the rule of her father and brother. She has seen children born under those very same rules grow to become soldiers and politicians and monsters of the empire.

Now both men are dead and another Emperor has risen, she continues to watch Rome with a cautious, silent eye. The empire is vast and ancient; it was here long before she was born and it will be here long after she is dead, stretching out for an eternity of mouldering grandeur and rotting idealism.

And once that eternity has past, its remnants will still be here, clawing at the dust of history, unrelenting in the desire to remain, to never surrender.

These men, these senators, believe that they will last forever.

She has always been a realist. No man can survive for long in this world. Good men, poor men, men of all seasons – none can last. She has seen them fall, one by one. On occasion, she has helped them go to it. She herself is surprised she still lives; but then, again, she is not a man. She is not as obtuse as they.

But she will never leave Rome again.

She is trapped here, filled with the fervent desire to flee – and she could, if she willed herself to do so, but she cannot bring herself to pull away from her ever-watchful place amongst the elite. There had been a time, long ago, when she had had a son. Lucius. His smile had lit her world, and there was nothing she would not do for him. She loved him so. Even now, she is convinced there is nothing quite like the love of a parent for their child. She remembers Maximus speaking so of his son; the same tone of voice, the same gentle expression in his eyes.

The memory freezes her, as fond of it as she is, and she dismisses it. It is better to forget. Better to continue on. He will not be waiting for her in the next life, she knows it; he had his own family, until it was murdered by her brother. Whatever it was the two of them had, it was nothing compared to what Maximus felt for his family. Otherwise, he would not have found himself on such a path to revenge. The gods would not have let him succeed.

She wishes not to think of it, though it becomes harder and harder not to remember with each passing day. Maximus was the last good man she knew. Once he was gone, there were no more good men in this world – merely men. Hungry men. Passionate men. Men with appetites, men with weapons. Men with ideas.

Those with ideas were the ones of which she had to be careful. Ideas were much more powerful than the sword, for once an idea was planted, it was unstoppable. She had seen the results of many ideas play out in the battlefield that is Rome; someone's blood is always spilt.

Ideas are dangerous – which is why she seldom shares them now and keeps them to herself. It is best that she keep to herself, lest she end up with a knife through her throat.

Upon occasion, she does wonder whether or not it is time for that as well. It is a simple enough action, one that could be easily performed by herself. She has grown weary of this world and its foul stink.

Lucius will be waiting for her, when her time comes. She knows he will. Perhaps it will only be he. She cannot say she was truly loved by any during her lifetime, aside from her son. Her father had some affection for her, but his true love was for his studies. His philosophies. His ideals.

A path she could never share; it was one thing upon which they never agreed.

As for her brother, she would be disheartened to see him in the next life. Indeed, she wishes that he continue to burn in the fires of hell for his atrocities. She has been free from his grasp for many years, but never free from his memory. She is certain she will never escape the ghost that is Commodus, but she will take some comfort knowing she will never face him again.

She is alone now. Perhaps she will be so forever. The sun continues to set and rise, shedding its light across the empire, but so little changes in her life. The days are long and there is no where she can flee.

The desire to surrender to death has never been stronger. When life grows stale, there is always the next path to follow.

Even as she thinks it, she grows cold. She has tried before; she has raised the knife, the cup, the rope, but she has never done the deed. Her will crumbles before the final moment and she cannot follow through with her action, no matter how strong her wish. It is a sign the gods have not finished with her; she longs to know what else they have in store, but they never answer.

They are silent, as always. Greater beings who refuse her desperate pleas. Perhaps even they have abandoned her, as all others have, to the silence and the dark.

She watches the sun now, a constant companion who has looked over her since birth. How many more times will she watch him rise and set? She feels her days are numbered.

Perhaps she will count them, as she once long before, when she was set on bringing new life into this desperate world, instead of taking lives from it. There are many things in this world to count; it brings order, where order is needed. Without order, she thinks perhaps she would go mad.

With each beat of her heart and each gasp of her breath, she is brought a little closer to the end. Undisturbed by this thought, she continues to stare at the sun, one hand shielding her gaze from the brightness that burns back at her.


End file.
